May 7

GERMANY:

Going to the Heart of the Holocaust

Thousands of bullet-gray concrete blocks rise crookedly from the earth
like fresh gravestones along what was once barren no man's land
surrounding the Berlin Wall. Deep underground is the wartime bunker
built for Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister. The site of the
razed Reich Chancellery, where Adolf Hitler plotted the extermination of
the Jews, is about 100 yards away.

On Tuesday, 60 years after the end of World War II in Europe, Berlin
officials will unveil a Holocaust memorial in the center of the German
capital to remember the 6 million European Jews who were killed.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was built after years of
wrenching argument in Germany over how far the nation must still go to
acknowledge its responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich.

First proposed in 1988, a year before the collapse of East Germany and
the dismantling of the wall, the memorial was delayed by bureaucratic
hurdles, disagreements over its design and outright opposition from many
Germans, including some Jews.

Some critics complained that it was too stark, too visible and too
painful a reminder for a people who had long confronted the Nazi past.
Others said the monument should also commemorate the estimated 5 million
other European victims of the Nazis, including Poles, political opponents,
homosexuals and members of the Roma minority, also known as Gypsies.

"This is a statement to the world. It is also a very late statement. It
needs to be pointed out that, until now, no central point existed" in
Berlin to commemorate the Holocaust, said Michael May, executive director
of the Jewish Community of Berlin.

"At the same time, this site has nothing to do with subtlety. Here you
have a kind of crystallization of the enormity of the crime in a memorial,
and that in and of itself is very significant," he said. "This cannot be
overlooked."

The memorial is a maze of 2,711 unadorned concrete rectangular slabs that
cover a city block not far from the Brandenburg Gate and the construction
site of the new U.S. Embassy. The slabs tilt slightly at varying angles,
and the ground rises and falls. Visitors must find their way through the
labyrinth, designed to disorient them at every step. Organizers said the
number of slabs had no symbolic significance but was dictated by the size
of the site.

"The power of the field is that you can only experience it by going
inside," said Guenter Schlusche, a consultant on the project, which was
designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman. "At first, people just
see a mass of concrete blocks," Schlusche said. "It's much, much more.
Once you get inside, you feel alone. You lose your normal ways of
orientation."

While Berlin has been rebuilt and rapidly reshaped since 1989, most of
the money and energy has been spent restoring historical landmarks or
buildings that predate the Nazi era. The few physical vestiges of the
Third Reich have largely been erased or covered up, a conscious decision
by German authorities, who have said they wanted to avoid preserving any
site that neo-Nazi groups could use as a shrine.

Only a small fiberglass marker notes the location of the Reich
Chancellery, which has been replaced by an expanse of apartment buildings
and a Chinese restaurant. There is an exhibit at the site of the
headquarters of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, but it has been
undergoing renovations. Until recently, the main memorial to Holocaust
victims in Berlin was a site near the suburb of Wannsee where the Nazis
furthered their plan for the Final Solution.

"For a lot of people, this is very uncomfortable," said Lea Rosh, a
former TV journalist and co-founder of the nonprofit group that led the
drive to build the monument. "This documents the largest crime in history.
They'd rather have pleasant news to see and read about."

The $35 million project was dogged by bitter disputes from the outset. In
1995, Chancellor Helmut Kohl rejected the original design, a sprawling
tombstone inscribed with the names of millions of Jews killed in the
Holocaust, and tried to persuade the architects to conceal the memorial
behind a border of trees. In 1999, former Berlin mayor Eberhard Diepgen
almost derailed the project by insisting on a radically different
approach: a single pillar bearing the words "Thou Shalt Not Kill." He was
overruled by the German Parliament, which voted by a 3-to-2 margin for the
current version.

Two years ago, construction was again delayed when it was disclosed that
an anti-graffiti coating for the concrete blocks was manufactured by a
German chemicals company, Degussa AG, with ties to the Holocaust. During
World War II, Degussa held a 42 percent stake in a pesticides firm that
made cyanide gas tablets for concentration camp gas chambers. After an
emotional public debate, board members in charge of the project decided to
use the chemical anyway, saying Degussa had taken major steps to face up
to its past.

Rosh said many opponents focused their criticism on tangential issues,
such as minor aspects of the design, rather than arguing openly that they
did not see the need for a memorial. She called this the underlying reason
it took 17 years to complete the project. Many Germans are tired of being
reminded of the evils of the Nazi regime, she said. "There are many people
who say, 'Sixty years, enough!' "

While public doubts have abated as the memorial's opening nears, some
criticism lingers. In a column published this week in the newspaper Die
Welt, the German author Hannes Stein called the project "monstrous kitsch"
and said the underlying message could be interpreted as: "The German
people give the Jews a graveyard."

Some Jewish residents of Berlin have expressed mixed feelings about the
memorial, said May, the Jewish community leader. "The process was tortuous
and possibly, I should say, shameful," he said.

But he held out hope that the memorial would serve its intended purpose:
to ensure that people always remember the Holocaust and feel its evil.
"The Jews in Berlin are slightly skeptical," May said. "Maybe if they take
the time to wander through it, that skepticism will disappear."

(source: Washington Post)

**********************


Critics say Germany's Holocaust memorial forgets some victims


Kurt Julius Goldstein, a German Jew who survived 18 months of slave labor
in the mines at the Auschwitz death camp, would seem to be the target
audience for his country's new Holocaust memorial. So why does he despise
it?

Goldstein, 90, survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald and lost 38 of 50 family
members to Nazi murder. But he says he can't shake the feeling that the
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe that will be unveiled here on
Tuesday is unfair to the Nazis' many other victims.

"You know, I was here, and they (the Nazis) didn't begin and end with the
Jews," he said. "How can we focus on our own suffering and ignore that of
the physically and mentally handicapped, the gays, the gypsies, the
communists, those who opposed them? This should be a place to unite us.
Instead, just like before, it divides."

Still, as the honorary president of three survivors and resistors groups,
Goldstein will attend the opening ceremony. "I thought about not going,
but I have to pay respect to those who died," he said.

Goldstein's concern is one of many about Germany's largest gesture of
repentance to date for the Holocaust. The memorial covers a piece of
central Berlin about the size of two football fields and consists of 2,711
stelae - concrete rectangles from 1 inch to 15 feet high - so that the
land resembles a field of tombs. They're intended to gradually oppress and
overwhelm those walking through the memorial.

The memorial occupies land near the Brandenburg Gate that in 1937 housed
Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels' office villa and later included his
bunker. In 1961, it became a piece of the notorious "death strip," no
man's land along the Berlin Wall that separated Communist East and
democratic West Berlin.

The memorial has strong advocates. Avishai Margalit, an Israeli
philosopher and author, backed the memorial plans, saying: "The way for
the Germans to re-establish themselves as an ethical community is to turn
their cruelty, which is what tied them to the Jews, into repentance."

The German government is also wholly committed. The official Bundestag
(the German parliament) resolution approving the building of the memorial
noted: "With the memorial we intend to honor the murdered victims, keep
alive the memory of these inconceivable events in German history and
admonish all future generations never again to violate human rights, to
defend the democratic constitutional state at all times, to secure
equality before the law for all people and to resist all forms of
dictatorship and regimes based on violence."

That resolution is why groups representing others murdered by Nazis say
they should be included, a position memorial organizers and others
disagree with. The government says it's committed to eventually
memorializing all victims of Nazi Germany.

There've been other complaints and concerns.

Officials realized the memorial could quickly become a graffiti target,
especially by neo-Nazi and other anti-Semitic groups, so Degussa AG was
brought in to provide an anti-graffiti coating. But Degussa is the company
that produced Zyklon B, the poison that was dropped into "shower rooms,"
killing millions of people in the death camps. Degussa was ruled to have
made restitution for its past actions, and the coating was used, but only
after construction was halted while the matter was debated.

Others note that Germany doesn't hide its past, pointing out that the
country already has numerous memorials to the Nazi genocide. Former camps
such as Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen are maintained
for educational tours. German students study the Holocaust in elementary,
middle and high school. German television provides a steady diet of
atrocity documentaries.

Recently, Germans are paying even more attention to the past. Outside
Berlin's Jewish Community Center Wednesday, people took turns reading the
names of Holocaust victims, taking more than an hour just to get through
the R's.

Still, German historian Wolfgang Wippermann wonders if the memorial
doesn't add to what he sees as "the Hollywoodization" of the Holocaust, an
increase in attention to the drama of the events that obscures, rather
than illuminates, the real horror of the Nazi years.

"In that case, this is a perpetrators' memorial, built by perpetrators and
for perpetrators," he said. "Once it's up, it's easier to say, `We've done
our job, now let's move on.'"

Several German writers and publishers, including Gunter Grass, a Nobel
Prize-winning author, urged the government to rethink the memorial. They
called it "abstract," "oppressively gigantic" and said it wasn't a "place
of quiet mourning and remembrance, or warning or enlightenment."

"Abandoning the project on the grounds of common sense would honor all
those involved," they wrote.

Those who spent 18 years trying to convince Germany it needed the memorial
disagree. They say that it will serve as a public and accessible reminder
to citizens and visitors.

"There must be memorials to all who suffered, and they must be in Berlin,"
said Jacob Schulze-Rohr, a member of the memorial board of directors. "But
they must be separate. A gypsy could become a Nazi. A lesbian could deny
her sexuality. Jews were separated from the rest of humanity by the simple
fact that they were born Jews. That alone was their death sentence."

He said the memorial shows Germany is taking its past seriously and is
committed to remembering, not repeating, it.

Alexander Golomshtok, 81, Jewish and formerly a Soviet Red Army soldier
who fought against the Nazis, said he can't imagine a more appropriate
place or reason for a memorial.

"This was a culture that waged war for racist reasons, the worst example
of what humanity has produced," he said. "I live here now. This country
treats me well. But we can never forget what happened. We need this
memorial."

(source: Knight Ridder Tribune)





USA//CONNECTICUT:

Ceremony honors Holocaust liberators


Four teenage girls found a young, American machine gunner stationed at a
death camp in Dachau 60 years ago, and asked him a question in Yiddish:
Was he Jewish?

"I'm the only Jew in this camp," Gilbert Reiter replied.

They asked him if he could find onions and potatoes so they could make
potato pancakes. He obliged. Later, two of the girls returned with plates
piled high with pancakes and asked him if he would accompany them.

The girls led him to a loft building near a Christian graveyard, where he
met the caretaker. Upstairs, the caretaker lifted up the floorboards,
revealing shawls, Torah scrolls and prayer books. In the graveyard, he dug
up two caskets filled with more, he said.

"He wants me to take all those Jewish things out and get them back to the
Jewish people," he recalled realizing, while telling the story during a
Holocaust memorial ceremony at the state Capitol Friday.

Reiter, 87, of Stratford, was one of five soldiers who had a role in
liberating the Nazi concentration camps who were honored at the ceremony,
held to mark the 60th anniversary of liberation. Reiter said he later led
a chaplain back to the site the girls had led him to, and the books and
shawls were recovered.

When he returned from the war, he donated one of the Torah scrolls to his
local synagogue in Bridgeport. He kept for himself two prayer books, which
he treasures.

Reiter also tells his story to school classrooms in an effort to keep the
memory of the Holocaust alive. He talks about the trains he found packed
with bodies of victims, and seeing men, women and children so thin they
looked like skeletons wearing old, dirty clothes.

Ben Cooper, who served in the same unit as Reiter but only met him for the
first time last week, does the same. The 83-year-old was among the
soldiers sent to witness what had happened at Dachau. He remembers the air
being permeated with the smell of flesh before he even arrived.

On the gate, there was a sign in German: "Work will make you free."

For years, Cooper didn't tell anyone what he saw. But in 1990, a
Torrington High School teacher asked him to tell his story, and he tried
to put words to it for the first time. He wrote everything down before he
spoke, but still choked up. Now, he can speak more freely.

"It's a healing process for me, and it's an eye opener for them," he said,
standing at the ceremony with his wife of 61 years.

Karin Fraade, the co-chairwoman of the ceremony and the daughter of a
Holocaust survivor, said many teenagers are unfamiliar with the Holocaust.
That's why it's so important to hear the stories of those who lived it,
she said.

"The generation that survived the Holocaust, that lived through this, are
dying," she said. After

(source: Associated Press)